Customer Reviews

The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball

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For me, this book is a picture of financial poverty and intellectual richness. What this broken family of three couldn't afford was plain as day to all of them, but the riches of language, of books, of words were flowing like so many rivers through their little cramped apartment, as if that was so normal. I love this book. There is a beauty in the way this not so interesting place comes into full color. ND is great at capturing his boyhood self. It makes me appreciate the details and undefined moments of my own childhood and alerts me to the overflowing otherness that my own children are likely experiencing in the world beside me.

Agent A

Any sports fan knows there are a few rules you never ever break. Once you choose a fave team, you are stuck with that team for life. Only under certain conditions can you change fave teams as follows:

1. Your fave team folds.

2. Your fave team moves.

3. Your fave team changes its name (i.e., California Angels begat Anaheim Angels begat the LA Angels of Anaheim)

You can "fire" your fave team if you have a bad owner or they trade a fave player but that's all you can do. There's no switching to another team to cheer for.

The worst move is to switch allegiances and cheer for a team in a hated rival's city. No self-respecting Yankee-hating, Met-loving fan would ever cheer for any team from Boston except maybe if they were playing the Yankees.

Given that I could not take anything this author says seriously at all. Sorry, I just can't.

Nicholas Dawidoff's memoir of his childhood, "The Crowd Sounds Happy," is a painfully beautiful recreation of his inner and outer worlds as a youngster. The subtitle, "A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball," neatly captures the book's three principal themes. Dawidoff grew up the child of a single mother in New Haven, Connecticut. His parents divorced when he was young, and it was many years before he became aware that the father he only saw on weekend visits and family get-togethers was mentally ill. His mother, a teacher, labored ceaselessly to fill the material and spiritual gaps in her son's life. Though her love for her son and daughter is clear, her presence seems too intense at times. Young Nicholas found his escapes in the life of the mind, the classroom, and in the athletic life, baseball.

One of Dawidoff's previous books is a biography of Moe Berg, a major league baseball player of the 1920s and 1930s, who was also a scholar, fluent in a number of languages, and a sometimes spy. The parallels between Berg's story and Dawidoff's are inexact, but intriguing, and this book may offer clues to his interest in Berg. Like Berg, Dawidoff inhabited multiple worlds, guarded his secrets, and often found himself uncomfortable with his contemporaries. Both found escape in baseball; for Dawidoff it was not only his joy in playing the game, but in studying its history, and rooting for his beloved Boston Red Sox, who seemed to eternally come up short every fall.

Dawidoff writes with great clarity and honesty. His story is often uncomfortable to share, but is beautifully and compellingly told.--William C. Hall

Among my all time favorites in the personal memoir about growing up with baseball are those of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Wilfrid Sheed. Nicholas DaWidoff's recent entry in this category has topped them all. It's not the usual "fathers playing catch with sons" story, for Dawidoff's parents were divorced and his father, suffering from mental illness, was an unsettling and sometimes looming presence on the fringe. This is an elegantly written and deeply moving account of a boy growing to manhood in the shadow of a broken family, coming to grips with it and learning to understand the heroic efforts of his mother to make things work. His own passion for and participation in baseball is not incidental, but is a primary source of solace and strength.

A great book relating real-life to baseball fandom especially from the perspective of a teenaged youth! Nick Dawidoff has always had more than a way with words dating back before his college newspaper years and his descriptions actually transport you to his New Haven CT home and neighborhood with his single mom, sister, and classmates. An avid and long-suffering Red Sox fan, he describes the complexities of a simpler time, when one hung on the every syllable of the radio play-by-play announcer for the game details. Nonetheless, these diamond idols were a great preoccupation for a young man facing the severe mental illness of his father in the yet unrejuvenated New York City. In addition to his fantastic description, you may be occasionally running to your (unabridge) dictionary to enlighten your vocabulary, yet these words are used judiciously and knowledgeably, giving expanse to his autobiographical account. A truly enjoyable read! The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball

A gorgeously written, warm-hearted, and sincere study of childhood and its many wonders... both good (the mysteries of the backyard, the baseball field, young love, the adult world in general) and not so good (a family dealing with mental illness, the unguided quest for the masculine self). Dawidoff comes across as a sensitive soul in search of meaning -- which his stalwart mother creates through the idea of order -- and comfort, finding it in the simplest and thus most profound places. The story is compelling, the prose inspired.

The Crowd Sounds Happy is an eloquent autobiography written with keen awareness and insight by someone that has survived and understood Severe Mental Disorders (SMD) in a parent. Laced with periods of happiness, the disturbing story describes the periodic psychoses of the author's father that required his family to flee when Nicky was a toddler. Resulting family anxieties haunted his obstacle-filled youth.

Nicky's forced visitations with an explosive, dangerous parent throughout his youth are devastating to witness. More devastating is his frugal, frustrated mother, cursing him as an ingrate in the next room of their tiny flat, where he can hear every word.

Mom forbade television and snacks, but made room for adventures: trips to the country, baseball games, and summer baseball camp. As a teacher, Mom instilled the love of reading in her children. That and radio led Nicky to develop a loyalty to baseball and the Boston Red Sox that had been his maternal grandfather's and aunt's favorites. Nicholas adopted the Sox as more his own more than many fans do their teams. They were his family.

Nickolas spent the bulk of childhood in New Haven, Connecticut during the 1960-70s, witnessing the city's decline into ruined welfare projects, abandoned schools and factories, street prostitution, pedophiles, and widespread crime. This harsh backdrop hosts the neuroses of families of patients suffering SMDs and the book shows how long-lived these conditions all become.

Nickolas describes how he dealt with the injustices placed into his life by others' mental illnesses and family-based anxieties that create magical thinking, the need to control, and the drive to please a world of others in order to avoid attack. While some teens turned to TV heroes, Nicholas turned to the Red Sox and sports writing, becoming a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Missouri-based brain research indicates the magnitude of damage done to children's neurology by parents with unsuccessfully untreated SMDs. Readers from middle school through adult can read The Crowd Sounds Happy to discover strong examples and solutions.

Armchair Interviews says: Powerful and well-written memoir from a child's point of view.

I truly didn't think that Mr. Dawidoff could top his last book, The Fly Swatter, but I was wrong! This account of his challenging youth, where baseball gives him solace in a fatherless household and he struggles to make sense of his father's mental illness, is captivating, lovely, poignant, and so, so vivid. Humor and levity exist alongside confusion and angst; his journey through his youth is told in exacting and wonderfully honed detail. Though most of us have not had to confront the same demons as the author, we can all relate to the adolescent feelings that they provoke and that he narrates with brilliance and sensitivity. This memoir is as riveting as the finest action novel -- and is all the more compelling because it is real. Recommended without reservation!

Growing up in lower middle-class household led by a frugal and severe mother, haunted by his absent and mentally ill father, Nick Dawidoff turned to the Boston Red Sox as his beacon of hope and guiding light and baseball as his true love. Loathing the Yankees not only because they were the Sox's eternal enemies, but also because they represented everything horrible in his life--he had to visit a seedy part of New York monthly in his dreaded visits to his father--Nick managed to wend his way through a difficult and untutored childhood, ultimately attending and graduating from Harvard and becoming a fine writer.

This is an inspirational book of childhood angst, love, torment, and baseball.

This memoir by Nicholas Dawidoff focuses on the author's not too happy years from the age of three until his entry into college. His family moved to New Haven and when his parents divorced, his Father lived in New York. He came from a highly educated family as his Father, a lawyer had graduated from Harvard and Yale and his Mother was a school teacher. There are three recurring themes in young Nicholas's life. 1) His Mother having very little money so they had to do without. 2) His Father's degrading mental capacity 3) Nicholas's love of baseball. In the early story telling you're led through the eyes and mind of a child 3-6 years old, but on any attempt at a nostalgic trip down memory lane, the reader is so heavily burdened with excess verbiage, that if the reader were a union employee, they'd be demanding time-and-a-half. The author's Mother does not allow a television in the house even when a relative gives one as a gift. So when Nicholas is growing up, a really unique situation develops; the worlds everyday culture is being created and evolving on TV, and without being able to learn any of the modern day "time-stamps" that the rest of society takes for granted, Nicholas has even more trouble fitting in. One such example is when he was at a friend's house and there was a poster on the wall of a curvy blond in a red bathing suit, with wavy blonde hair. All the other guys gave her the proper attention, but Nicholas had no idea who Farah Fawcett of "Charlie's Angels" was.

As early as the third page the author makes a very mean spirited comment about his Father's mental capacity: "At a certain point my Father began talking to the squirrels, and he believed that even the dead ones were initiating conversations, communicating with him on urgent matters, instructing him when to strike, and whom." Less powerful comments continue throughout the early going, but the reader isn't given any real insight as to why for over one-hundred pages. To his Mother he says: "My friends don't like to come over to my house because we don't have a TV, we never have any snacks, and they don't like how much you yell." His only solace is listening to baseball games on his radio. First dedicating his loyalty to the New York Mets and then he switches to the Boston Red Sox for life. He portrays himself as a solitary mope, and the only thing he can depend on is being let down every year by the Red Sox. Not until the last twenty pages or so of the book does he shed any real light on his Father's problems, and perhaps the most empathy towards his Father is shown after the story itself ends. Under the heading "SOURCE NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS" (And I must admit I normally don't read these, but I happened to find something in there that caught my eye.) in small print after thanking about fifty people, on the third page, in the second to last paragraph he wrote: "WHEN I THINK NOW OF MY FATHER, DONALD DAWIDOFF, I REMEMBER WHAT DIETRICH BONHOEFFER WROTE FROM PRISON: "WE MUST FORM OUR ESTIMATE OF HUMAN BEINGS LESS FROM THEIR ACHIEVEMENTS AND FAILURES, AND MORE FROM THEIR SUFFERINGS."